


Fragile

by semele



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-15
Updated: 2016-04-15
Packaged: 2018-06-02 09:37:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6561247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/semele/pseuds/semele
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sinclair watches Raven grow over the years.</p><p>(Goes AU somewhere in s2, because lol what is canon.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fragile

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pe_bcna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pe_bcna/gifts).



> Requested by Roci, who demanded 20k words of Sinclair being Raven's father figure. I kind of fucked up the 20k part, but hey, what can you do?

Truth to be told, Zero-G never meant much to Sinclair. It was means to an end; a way to get out of Hydra Station, out of tight rations and repetitive tasks, and all-too-familiar places seen every day. He didn’t particularly care what he did instead. His teachers said he had a talent for making things tick, so Zero-G it was. Anything to get a transfer, and leave home behind together with his first name, because it doesn’t matter anymore. He’ll be the only Sinclair on Mecha.

It isn’t until he gets his hands on the big engines, and looks into the belly of the beast, that Zero-G sneaks up on him. The Ark is complex, yes, the Ark is unpredictable and fascinating, but what really gets to Sinclair is that the Ark is fragile. A piece of decaying metal holding two thousand eight hundred souls up in the sky.

(It’s two thousand eight hundred when Sinclair is nineteen. That changes later.)

***

Since Sinclair isn’t _from_ Mecha, he doesn’t really know Rosa Reyes.

Sure, he hears a word here and there, from people who mock her and people who pity her, but he doesn’t really pay much attention to all that. Rosa is the local drunk, and every station has a few of those; she had talent and she wasted it, and even now she can’t keep her mouth shut. If someone doesn’t do something quickly, that kid of hers will end up just like her.

But this is the Ark, and no one does anything, so Sinclair doesn’t meet Raven Reyes until she’s about twelve.

It’s a memorable moment, or at least it gets stuck in his head for years to come. Raven gets caught sneaking around in the workshop, and she’s led out of her hiding place kicking and sputtering, because she’s done nothing wrong, she didn’t break anything, she was just looking, leave her alone, leave her the hell alone.

Sinclair has a nagging feeling that “hell” isn’t the word she meant to use, but apparently she still has some self-preservation.

He’s about to send her away with a note on her school record, and he really means to do just that, because why wouldn’t he? Sinclair is the strict type, and he mostly plays by the rules, but there is something about this kid that makes him look twice. Raven isn’t just small, she’s shaky and gaunt, as if anger was all that was keeping her upright, and he doesn’t exactly mean to cut her slack, but then, what kind of a kid sneaks into high tech workshops to watch people work?

“If you wanna look around, come back after six,” he tells her sternly, then, surprised, watches her face light up. “I’ll show you around.”

She is back at the workshop door three minutes after six, as if she couldn’t wait any longer, and asks fewer questions than he expected, too focused on watching and touching without restraint. Raven is careful in her movements, all slow steps and deft fingers, and it doesn’t even occur to him, in that moment, that she’s twelve, and he should probably take all the breakable, unique parts out of her hands to protect them. It seems silly, even this early on, to try and protect the Ark from Raven Reyes.

She keeps coming back after that, always knocking politely and waiting to be let in, asking about school projects and tiny solutions she comes up with in that brilliant head of hers. If it doesn’t occur to Sinclair to slip her some food during those afternoons she spends in his workshop, it’s on his conscience and his alone.

***

Raven is about fourteen by the time Sinclair starts giving her small tasks in the workshop, annoyed by how pointless the tasks she brings from school are. He’s just training an apprentice, he tells himself seriously, because those people in the training group aren’t worth shit, and he’d better take care of grooming Raven since she all but fell from the sky right into his turf. It’d be wasteful to not give her a little push.

So one day he sets a ruined heating unit in front of her, something that no one has hopes of salvaging, and tells her to take it apart so they can use the parts for other things. She’s silent at first, surprised at being given work, then she digs into her new project like her life depended on it. After a few days, it becomes abundantly clear that she got it into her head that she’d fix the unit against all odds, and Sinclair lets her fight it out for a few days before he steps in, and shows her exactly which parts are fried beyond repair. It’s probably meant to be a life lesson of some sort, but he isn’t sure. He just wants her to understand how heating works.

She finishes dismantling the unit without further delay, and asks for another task, so Sinclair arranges it with the Mecha quartermaster to make an exception, and exchange Raven’s standard issue dinners into a fancier Zero-G ration delivered straight to the workshop, so she can eat like everyone else on the afternoon shift. It’s the least he can do, since she’s doing work and not getting paid. He isn’t from Mecha, and he doesn’t know any details, but he has a feeling that the Ark took enough out of Raven already.

A year later, Raven has enough discarded parts gathered in a box under her desk that she rebuilds a heating unit from scratch, then puts it on Sinclair’s desk with a defiant expression, and a strange air of a debt paid. It tells him that this is about more than just her being proud of her skills.

***

Rosa Reyes dies when Raven is seventeen, and Raven still shows up in the workshop the next day, eyes dry and hands shaky, I’m okay, I said I’m fine. Put me to work.

She’s in Zero-G training by then, and the only thing Sinclair had to do to make that happen is let her know that it was possible to apply to be fast-tracked if she can line up three good letters of recommendation, and pass a test. The test, he knows, is child’s play, and he reads her already graded answers with pleasure that surprises him, because honestly. Since when does he get excited about descriptions of screws and solars?

But now’s not the time for fond memories. For now, he gives Raven a simple job to keep her busy, and stares her down when she tries demanding something more challenging despite her distraught state. The Ark, he doesn’t say, is fragile, and it needs better than your shaky fingers.

He stays in the workshop long after hours, and he thinks he’s good enough at seeming busy that Raven never realizes that he’s staying for her, keeping an eye on her until she tires herself out, and stumbles back home on unsure feet, making people talk.

 _We all knew this would happen,_ he hears here and there the next morning. _No one gave a shit about that kid, and now look what happened. Great way to honor old mom’s death. I wonder who she had to fuck to get into Zero-G._

So when Raven’s medical report comes in, Sinclair takes a look at it, and breaks the rules for the first time in his life. The Ark is fragile, yes, it’s delicate and precious, a piece of decaying metal holding two thousand two hundred souls. The Ark needs better than shaky fingers, needs better than a time bomb of a mechanic with a heart murmur who can endanger important, time-sensitive maintenance, but holy shit, Raven Reyes deserves so much better than the Ark as well.

Fine. Maybe he doesn’t exactly think “holy shit”.

***

When the Ark falls from the sky, Sinclair is so sure this is the end that for the first few days after landing, he walks around as if stunned, shocked by the perspective of imminent life. 

He crashed with Alpha, of all stations, Hydra or Mecha a distant memory, and in a way, this is all he ever wanted, new people and new places, what a break from the routine, be careful what you wish for, Philip Sinclair.

(Was it Philip? He forgets.)

Raven is on the ground as well, and at first, he doesn’t really have the guts to approach her. Who is he to her, really? Who has he been, since he didn’t realize she’d get it into her head to travel to the ground in a godforsaken tin can she fixed herself in record time? Not family and not a friend, an acquaintance at best, maybe a teacher if she’s feeling generous. What he doesn’t know of Raven Reyes could fill a book, and he could’ve known if he’d made an effort, except he decided to groom her instead.

But then he hears her scream, and he runs to her anyway.

That brace of hers is a disgrace, but there are no parts to make it better, and anyway, Sinclair starts having a nagging feeling that he taught Raven too well, there is no time, there is no time, hurry.

This camp is fragile, and it needs more than what we’re giving it.

It will be on his conscience later, but he lets her fight it out for a few months. Sinclair can’t change who he is, and he’s a strict type, careful and patient, and not about to tell people that he knows how they should live their lives. But when she comes to him and says she wants to leave camp and build a settlement someplace new, he’s ready to go in under ten minutes like it’s a no-brainer, like he isn’t leaving his whole life behind.

What the hell. Wouldn’t be the first time.

***

Raven still calls him sir even as they’re building him a home together, and even later, when she moves in to a hut right next to his. In her mouth, it becomes a kind word, and she says it in such a way that some Grounders who come in for trade pick it up as a nickname, convinced that this is the word Ark English has for beloved village elders. It is, Sinclair supposes, as good a name as any, and he doesn’t protest even when Nate Miller picks it up with an impish grin, and carries it around the village. 

Maybe this is how this new settlement sneaks up on him, in the end; not with heating and sewage systems it needs him to design, or messy home politics it needs him to ignore, but a fond “Morning, sir!” he hears when he steps into his and Raven’s workshop every day, and the challenges she throws at him. Parts of the Ark still clutter their worktops, even after three or four years, and Sinclair could probably draw the station from memory now better than ever, which, ironic, all things consider.

He could, he supposes, draw some sketches for posteriority’s sake, just so they know where they came from, but there is always so much to do in the village, between repairs, and inventions, and need. Truth to be told, Sinclair rarely has time, and when he does catch a free hour during the day, well. He usually just ends up having lunch with Raven.


End file.
